Amalie Dahl’s Dafnie EXTENDED - Live at Moldejazz (Sonic Transmissions, 2026)

By Brian Earley

Sometimes I catch myself living a pathetic fallacy, finding parallels in song development, timbre shifts, volume dimensions, or any element of sound really, and feeling a correlation to the moment, whether social, emotional, political or otherwise. And even though composer and saxophonist Amalie Dahl uses evocative titles like “floating,” “slow motion,” and “in flux,” amplitude and hertz themselves are not drifting and turning through the morning headlines of suffering, rising fascism, and encroaching chaos. But the world needs an image for longing, or at least I do, if I am going to confront and make some sense out of the violence unfolding across the globe. The world is in lurching flux, and Dahl’s latest work, Dafnie EXTENDED, Live at Moldejazz from Sonic Transmission Records, meets the moment, even if I know I am making it so out of personal necessity.

Amalie Dahl’s Dafnie is the active quintet of Norwegians Dahl (composition and reeds), Oscar Andreas Haug (trumpet), Jørgen Bjelkerud (trombone), Nicolas Leirtrø (bass) and Veslemøy Narvesen (drums). On the band’s two earlier releases, 2022’s Dafnie and 2024’s Står op med solen , the music one moment voices itself small and intimate and then shifts suddenly into dynamics that sound far larger, louder, and varied than they should for only five instruments. According to EXTENDED’s press release, in this new work “Dahl aims to expand and intensify the Dafnie sound and create a larger, more powerful musical experience.” Dahl attempts this by doubling the rhythm section and adding a total of seven new musicians to the group: Sofia Salvo (baritone sax), Henriette Eilertsen (flute and electronics), Ida Løvli Hidle (accordion), Lisa Ullén (piano), Anna Ueland (synth), Ingebrigt Håker Flaten (double bass), and Trym Karlsen (drums), and in doing so she creates a Dafnie big band that explodes through my speakers out of the softest reverberations of sound.

Take, for instance, the third track on the album, “drifting_turning.” The work opens with one bass quietly bowing harmonics over the other, but by the 1:30 mark the basses produce perhaps the loudest and biggest bass sound I have ever heard through scratches, bangs and extended techniques. Dahl’s saxophone sneaks into the aural scape and begins to play a seemingly improvised one-two-three melodic pattern. However, in a move characteristic of this album as a whole, around 2:45 the band joins the saxophone and varies the same melodic fragment. This parallel between improvisation and composition is striking on this album, and nowhere is it more effective than on this song. The band begins to grow in volume, see-sawing in unison at a three and five note uneven melody until, at 4:50, the band absolutely explodes, unleashing torrents of sound that burn the once hushed melody to ash, out of which soars a solo of Anna Ueland’s synth electronics that annihilates the sonic air around it while the double rhythm section crashes underneath. At 6:15 the band begins to swing like the Ellington at Newport musicians had fallen off their chairs all the while keeping the blues going. The bass and percussion soon project forceful speed and the synth soloist, accordion and horns, inspired to do the same, urge the sound into the ether. But wait! The band again assembles itself into a kind of unison that reveals preformed composition out of what had sounded like pure improvisation until it climaxes at the 8:35 mark before simmering into its closing wash of electronics.

This parallel of improvisation and composition is executed so seamlessly, and with such organic precision, that this music rivals the best I have ever heard. Part of me hates to shift into such hyperbolic phrasing, but I feel I need to communicate just how good this album is, and, if I could hear just one more experimental song in my life, it damn well might be “drifting_turning.”

The album ends with a work titled “longing.” Here is where all of the explosivesness I fallaciously find mirrored in the earlier works as counterpart to the chaos and violence of our time manifests into an aching form for hope. A bass solo evolves into one of the saddest snippets of harmony and melody I can recall hearing, and when Dahl’s saxophone plays, I know I am lying to myself, but I swear the solo here is the very image of longing. It is the human internalization and expression of homesickness, of a desire for better days. It is longing for peace, and it is a kind peace itself, ultimately, that can be measured objectively in decibels. No self-consuming despot could possibly carry out fascist power grabs if they listened, really listened, to Oscar Andreas Haug’s trumpet solo or the swinging and soaring band that plays alongside it.

The work, like all longing, remains unresolved, and stops at the 11:00 mark, leaving an appreciative crowd in silence before it too erupts into its own dynamic shift of applause. So much intelligence is alive on this album, but so much depth of feeling is present as well. The community of musicians on Dafnie EXTENDED has lit a torch in the darkness friends, and for me, this is the album of the year so far, and if there are any other floating souls out there needing to give substance and form to their ghosts, I urge you to listen to it.

Amalie Dahl’s Dafnie EXTENDED can be found at https://amaliedahl.bandcamp.com/album/live-at-moldejazz